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Not most of the proceeds, no. Honestly, all the garbage "cancer awareness" merchandise mostly goes to benefit the companies that mass produce them, not the any sort of research.

Given the amount of merchandise they produce for this ****, unfortunately, that kind of has to happen. They really should kick most of the merchandise, for a decent number of self-evident reasons. (tl;dr "stupid ****ing consumer culture")

Let's not get into how scummy "save second base"-type things are. Because we all know.

PM me if you want my Discord.
It's way easier than getting in touch with me on here.

I don't find Pesky's soapbox speech all that enlightening. The stuff about money being wasted through capitalistic/bureaucratic charities is very important, and the stuff about doing more volunteering and social work on the individual, private level is totally A+. But otherwise, Pesky, you essentially s*** all over all of the biomedical researchers who have dedicated their lives to finding an eventual cure for cancer. Call me wishy-washy, but I'd rather we keep doing both: the nurse/doctor-stuff of trying to ameliorate the immediate pains, and the researcher-stuff of trying to understand and solve the problem before it gets to that point. It just rings hollow in my ears when the overarching thesis casts cancer researchers as awful capitalist stooges who aren't actually helping anybody.

Maybe that was just an unintended side-effect of your tirade against Big Pharma (a well-deserved tirade it is, honestly), but in that case may I suggest fine-tuning the nuances of your rhetoric to avoid side-swiping innocent bystanders.

Robin Williams
1951-2014"What's it gonna be? I don't know. But maybe along the way, you take my hand, tell a few jokes, and have some fun. C'mon, pal. You're not afraid, are ya?"

also profesco as someone who is already studying stuff that may help with cancer someday (lol probably not) and might go into the field for real when i finish school, i didnt really think she was shitting on people who contribute to research. what i got from it was that donating to stuff is not the most useful thing you could be doing when there are massive societal problems that prevent people with cancer from utilizing the treatments we already have, meaning they probably wouldnt be able to use any new treatments we came up with. there's a "joke" in my department that anyone who actually found a cure that could be cheaply and easily distributed to people would be taken out by big pharma before word got out.. and i bet it has at least some truth to it :x

i agree with you that both are important, just that it seems like a ton of people seem to forget about the part that pp is mentioning

Little Miss Stalinist/Secret Al-Qaeda agents (i.e. Ellie) would be a ***** even if she was a conserative republican. What makes her the way she is happens to be the fact that the webmaster of this site let's her behave like this. (Of course, I would never make a liberal a staff member at any forum I'd be in charge of, regardless.)

[21:03] <+Skiks> ellie is out of context
[21:04] <+Skiks> the experience

also profesco as someone who is already studying stuff that may help with cancer someday (lol probably not) and might go into the field for real when i finish school, i didnt really think she was shitting on people who contribute to research. what i got from it was that donating to stuff is not the most useful thing you could be doing when there are massive societal problems that prevent people with cancer from utilizing the treatments we already have, meaning they probably wouldnt be able to use any new treatments we came up with. there's a "joke" in my department that anyone who actually found a cure that could be cheaply and easily distributed to people would be taken out by big pharma before word got out.. and i bet it has at least some truth to it :x

i agree with you that both are important, just that it seems like a ton of people seem to forget about the part that pp is mentioning

That's all there, and you're right. It's probably just me being cautious with the way I'd express things. I got what you got from it, but I also seem to have gotten more. So in the interest of showing from where my criticism was derived, I'll quote to explain.

You also know what "finding a cure" doesn't fix? People who can't ****ing afford their treatments.

Supporting research and raising awareness are all really great, but they don't help the people who are suffering right now.

It is the structure of juxtaposition here that gives a strong impression that curing cancer and supporting research to find such a cure for cancer are inferior alternatives to helping current cancer victims afford treatment and avoid suffering. If they're not meant to be presented as competing alternatives, this rhetorical style is ill-considered. The first quote in particular looks disparaging to anyone who ever thought "finding a cure" for cancer was a good idea. (I believe the scare quotes around 'finding a cure,' though, are meant to deride its motivational use in advertisements by such foundations as the Komen group. This is more respectable but does not improve the tone.)

One last thing, your donation to research doesn't change the number of people whose insurance companies drop them due to them having cancer.

This may be a sad fact, but considering an individual's contribution to cancer research isn't going to impact an insurance company's policy decisions one way or another, there is little meaning left to glean from the sentence's inclusion except the futility/uselessness of (donating to) cancer research. Presumably we could fund cancer research while simultaneously pressuring insurance companies not to be monsters. Why disparage funding the research?

There is a theme of setting [funding cure research] against [funding currently-suffering individuals] in Pesky's soapbox speech. There is also a justified anger at the capitalizing influence of the pharmaceutical industry on biomedical research, but the indiscriminate rhetoric drags people who donate to or conduct cancer research into the whirlwind of scorn. I think first that the theme is a false antagonism (why not do both?) and that second it should be easier to not disparage cancer researchers as useless/negligent.

Also,

Originally Posted by Pesky Persian

Yeah, you go for it, man. You make those donations so that when something effective is found*, people can literally buy their lives from Big Pharma.

My heroes.

This is just being dinky to someone who thought they were helping by donating to cancer research. Educate the kid on how the processes in place aren't as helpful as they claim to be, but don't snark at him for donating to cancer research. There ought to be a gazillion better things to make someone feel bad about themselves for.

Also, instead of trying to dissuade people from from buying cancer charity merchandise, people should use that effort to force companies to give more of the money made to research. People blame the big companies yet don't give them credit for actually getting the word out. I agree that's it's pretty shitty that maybe 7 cents of every dollar gets donated but there are tons of people that don't even know about breast cancer. Stopping this...awareness in favor of private donations, probably isn't going to do much for anyone. I do think there should be more hands-on help for the victims but it wont improve just because we stop donating to high profile charities.

Ellie basically hit the nail on the head. I wasn't intending to sound like cancer research is bad, just that it's not the only important way you can help people who are battling cancer. Research is extremely important, but it doesn't solve any of the current issues that these people face. I'm not dissing research or researchers (I'll always diss Big Pharma, though, Ellie's department's "joke" is spot-on, unfortunately), but I think a lot of people forget the people who actually live with cancer on a daily basis. This also isn't the debate forum and I don't have to justify my stance to you so I would appreciate if you'd ease up on the tone policing.

And JB, how many people aren't already aware that cancer is a problem? I'm betting the numbers are pretty low. Your breast cancer example is kind of ridiculous, especially considering the entire month of October is basically used to reduce the importance of women to their breasts in the name of "awareness." The vast majority of people have known someone who has suffered from cancer. We're aware of the problem. And I'll always dissuade people from buying cancer charity merchandise if you aren't sure 100% of proceeds actually go to cancer research. You can't force companies (in the U.S. at least) to donate more just because they say they'll donate some. Profiting off of someone else's suffering is utterly disgusting and I will never support it.